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Hedi’s Friend Diogenes

Part 2 of the essay, “Permanence Reviewed”.

In 1944 Einstein read a letter from his old friend Hedwig (Hedi) Born. In it she begins, “I have read [your letter] several times and once again had that feeling of liberation I used to get from our talks during the war.” Later in the letter she touches on a philosophical vein that had existed in those talks ever since they first became friends: “I, too, am unable to believe in a ‘dice-playing’ God, nor am I able to imagine that you believe – as Max has just told me when we were discussing it – that your ‘complete rule of law’ means that everything is predetermined, for example, whether I am going to have my child inoculated against diphtheriae or not, etc….

“Things would then be as in Omar the tentmaker:

“’That I would drink during my lifetime

“’God has known for all eternity….’

“I have forgotten what follows, but it must have been: where then is ethics, the consciousness of striving?

“You could probably explain this to me with just a few of those vigorous words of yours.”¹

As it happens, in 1919 Einstein had written to her exactly how he would have responded to Omar the Tentmaker’s sentiment: “What you call ‘Max’s materialism’ is simply the causal way of looking at things. This way of looking at things always answers only the question ‘Why?’, but never the question ‘To what end?’. No utility principle and no natural selection will make us get over that. However, if someone asks ‘To what purpose should we help one another, make life easier for each other, make beautiful music or have inspired thoughts?’, he would have to be told: ‘If you don’t feel it, no-one can explain it to you.’ Without this primary feeling we are nothing and had better not live at all.”² But Einstein was a much different person before 1920 than after, more irreligious and anti-nationalist than Zionist, more pacifist than advocate for nuclear weapons development, and more defeater of absolutes in the intellectual tradition he began than proponent of any ‘complete rule of law’ in science or philosophy. It’s perhaps this story of his friendship with Max and Hedi Born that offers the most illuminating window into his transformation.

Max and Hedi became friends with Einstein when he moved to Berlin during the First World War. They would visit each other frequently and help each other stay sane with music, poetry and conversation. With Max, Einstein found a comfortable conversation partner on, not only the sciences in which they were life-long colleagues, but in politics and human-relationships, particularly during the complex and tumultuous times of the Great War. With Hedi, he found an intellect quite different than his own, fueled by literature, philosophy and theology, so that he himself could delve into subjects that typically sat outside his mind, and find conversational-companionship that otherwise eluded him: “I have no need to assure you how found I am of you both and how glad I am to have you as friends and kindred spirits in this…desert,” he wrote in February of 1918.³

For someone like Einstein, kindred spirits were crucial for keeping him, at least sometimes, interested in the world outside his mind. Later that year, in April, he delivered what Hedi will later reference as his “talk to Plank”. In the talk, motives for research, Einstein hypothesizes about the motives of those who occupy the temple of science, highlighting Planck as a special breed. What Hedi references is a segment about what drives scientist like Planck (and, more importantly for Hedi, Einstein) into the temple in the first place: “I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman’s irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

“With this negative motive there goes a positive one. Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.”⁴

As the war came to a close, and the completion of general relativity, along with the final fallouts of Einstein’s divorce, and a most likely not unrelated stomach ulcer that debilitated him, he began to withdraw from society. In the summer of 1918, while on vacation in Ahrenshoop, he wrote to Max: “It is wonderful here, no telephone, no duties, absolute peace. I simply can’t imagine now how you can bear life in the big city. And the weather is wonderful too. I lie on the beach like a crocodile and let myself be roasted by the sun, I never see a newspaper and don’t give a damn for what is called the world.”⁵

But in those days his human spirit was too alive to ever withdraw completely. Later, in a 1926 letter to Einstein, Hedi reflected on words he spoke most likely during this particularly difficult period: “But what interests me most in people is their spiritual attitude to life, rather than just their fate; most of the so-called tragic destinies are nothing more than the brutal vicissitudes of life, which are linked by pure chance to one particular individual. When I think of you, for example, I do not think of individual talents and achievements, but I marvel at your supreme mastery of life itself. I remember something you once said, which for me is the key to your personality and way of thinking: when you lay gravely ill you said: ‘I have such a feeling of solidarity with every living being, that it does not matter to me where the individual begins and ends’. You probably put it much more beautifully, but this is what you meant. Individual acts mean nothing to me: they are just a momentary flash of light.”⁶

A second letter from Ahrenshoop indicated Einstein’s desire to return to societal life: “Brilliant landscape and satisfied citizens, who have nothing to fear. This is how it looks. But God knows, I prefer people with anxieties, whose tomorrow is threatened by uncertainty. How will it all end? One cannot tear one’s thoughts away from Berlin…”⁷ At that time both Einstein and Max retained optimism for the future of post-war Germany. Max became slightly more fearful about Germany’s reaction to punishments from the allies, but Einstein retained his optimism, “Eventually Germany’s dangerousness will go up in smoke…”⁸

In 1919 Einstein and his relativity theory rose to a fame never achieved by a scientist before. By the end of the year it was clear that Einstein was not equipped to navigate such an inflated public persona, in particular the fact that newspapers were so quick to grab any comment that could indicate a drama amongst scientific colleagues, a phenomenon that would continue in many ways, including by portraying collegial debates on quantum physics between him and Max as representing some kind of scientific spike between them, when in fact their philosophical disagreements only ever grew their friendship stronger. By the end of the year he was also losing his optimism for Germany, seeing now that the allies would not pull back from the harshness of retribution against her, and that Germany would be unable to recover from the hurt to her pride. But neither Max nor Einstein at that point new just how bad things would become, and still spoke and thought frequently about Germany’s future.

In January of 1920 Einstein’s mother became ill. She was in a “hopeless condition and suffering unspeakably”. She would remain in that condition until her death in March. It was an unbearably difficult time for Einstein, but from his friend Hedi he did not want sympathy, “Mrs. Born, make yourself interesting in a most reprehensible way. (Whimsical poems and witty letters only are permitted.)”⁹

But in that same sad spring Hedi would bare witness to her own mother’s death from the flu pandemic that followed the war. That deeply philosophical relationship between Einstein and Hedi would help guide them both. In April, Einstein wrote, “The news of the bitter experience you had to go through has touched me deeply. I know what it means to see one’s mother suffer the agony of death and be unable to help. There is no consolation. All of us have this heavy burden to bear, for it is inseparably bound up with life. However, there is one thing: to unite in friendship, and to help one another to carry the burden. We do, after all, share so many happy experiences that we have no need to give way to pointless brooding. The old, who have died, live on in the young ones. Don’t you feel this now in your bereavement when you look at your children?”¹⁰ Hedi would not weather the storm as well as Einstein. Max reported that she had “collapsed in the end, as a result of all the excitement, pain and overexertion”.¹¹

Hedi slowly recovered over the summer and eventually wrote back to Einstein: “We are very happy that you will be coming to Nauheim, and I hope that you will stay with us for a few days. I am now – after my mother’s death – so much in need of these true relationships of the spirit which are left to me. The further the hour of her death lies behind us, the stronger is my longing for the departed; the darker and more incomprehensible seems the enigma of death. The ending of such a strong personality and the sudden extinction of life is such a tormenting problem that one wonders how one is able to live without being constantly troubled by it…One lives under the illusion that it is forever May, and that the whole world is constantly filled with young, juicy and delicious greenery, put there just for one’s own use, and then all of a sudden and incredibly fast it happens, and one finds oneself lame and weary of life in the mud of a rain-soaked road. So I thought, well, I am now in the mud, but I can see that it is still May, after all, and I must not allow myself to be pulled down.” From their exchange it would seem that Einstein’s trip to Nauheim would let them both rediscover young, juicy and delicious greenery of May, but instead events would pass that would bring dark times to even Hedi and Einstein’s bond.¹²

On the 24th of August, 1920, Paul Weyland and Ernst Gehrcke presented lectures against relativity at the Philharmonic theatre in Berlin, with Einstein in attendance. The lectures were not just against relativity, but were an attack against Einstein himself as a propagandist who confused scientist and the general public using “mass suggestion”.¹³ It was in the opinion of most at that time that the lectures were a despicable and shameful attack that Einstein should not have had to respond to. He had already spent his career enthusiastically meeting challenges to relativity from every corner of science and philosophy, and could have easily allowed his success in meeting every previous challenge, combined with the ever accumulating experimental evidence confirming his predictions, to simply speak for itself. In fact it was a time far more apt for exploring the value of relativity theory. Following the lecture, a self-described laymen, Ina Dickmann, wrote to Einstein: “The theory of relativity opened up for me a philosophical world of infinite breadth. In my mind’s eye the constraints and boundaries of philosophical systems collapsed, and, for now, my thoughts wander about in the new world (—that is what it is to me) without a horizon in sight. Viewing relativity means to me the toppling of the absolute and the rise of another epistemological world.”¹⁴

But Einstein was drawn into conflict rather than the celebration of relativity. He published an article titled, My Response, which defended relativity and himself against the attacks.¹⁵ For his participation in the conflict he was admonished by his colleagues, who expressed great displeasure at seeing a side of Einstein they did not think existed, and pleaded with him to not make anymore public statements.^{16, 17, 18, 19}

Einstein was never equipped to navigate a life of fame, but nobody then could possibly know how to navigate a public image that put them at the centre of something as barbaric as an absolute-dehumanization within what was for many the most sacred part of modern society: the temple of science. Only Hedi could understand exactly what turmoil would exist within Einstein’s soul during that time, and she wrote to him with a desire to pull him back from the depths she knew he would sink into:

“We are extremely sorry to hear about the unpleasant rows that are worrying you. You must have suffered very much from them, for otherwise you would not have allowed yourself to be goaded into that rather unfortunate reply in the newspapers. Those who know you are sad and suffer with you, because they can see that you have taken this infamous mischief-making very much to heart. Those who do not know you get a false picture of you. That hurts too. In the meanwhile I hope you are like old Diogenes again and smile about the beasts thrashing about in your barrel. That people can still disappoint and irritate you to the point where it affects your peace of mind just does not fit my image of you, which I keep on the private altar of my heart. You could not have withdrawn from the rough and tumble of ordinary life to the ‘secluded temple of science’ (see your talk to Planck) had you been able to find the same illusions, the same happiness and peace in your fellow-man as in your temple. So if the filthy waters of the world are now lapping at the steps of your temple, shut the door and laugh. Just say, ‘After all, I have not entered the temple in vain.’ Don’t get angry. Go on being the holy one in the temple – and stay in Germany! There is filth everywhere – but not another female preacher as enthusiastic and self-opinionated as your affectionate friend

“Hedi Born”²⁰

Hedi understands fully what Einstein finds in scientific-contemplation. When the walls go up to protect that landscape where Einstein once bent time to conform to otherwise misunderstood phenomenon, so that in an instance special relativity had manifested itself, where he once saw the equivalency between gravity felt on earth and acceleration felt in a train, so that in an instance general relativity had manifested itself, where he had no need to declare his philosophical allegiances, to contextualize the sciences he loved in terms of some aspect of his personal life, where he could simply appreciate the beauty of every “flash of light” on his own terms, she understood that Einstein found peace and tranquility. But just because she understood did not mean she believed such isolated thinking was forever good. In fact it worried her, and that’s why she wished that Einstein could, “find the same illusions, the same happiness and peace in your fellow-man as in your temple.”

Einstein never heeded Hedi’s advice. In My Response he challenged his opponents to further debate in Bad Nauheim, debates which were carried out in September. Rather than putting an end to the despicableness of the anti-relativists, the debates brought the antisemitic undertones straight to the surface, as well as Einstein and Max’s anger in their in-person response. About the fallout of the debates, Max later wrote: “From then on Lenard carried out a systematic persecution of Einstein. He invented the difference between ‘German’ and ‘Jewish’ physics. He and another important physicist, Johannes Stark, who both later received the Nobel Prize, became leading scientific administrators under the Nazis and were responsible for the removal of all Jewish scholars. It was in Nauheim on this occasion that the outlines of the great danger of antisemitism to German science first appeared.”²¹

Hedi was not one to suffer alone, which was why she wished for Einstein that he could “find the same illusions, the same happiness and peace in your fellow-man as in your temple.” Of course she would want him to heal in company because she would still be healing herself, still in need of “true relationships of the spirit”. But Einstein left the Borns behind in Bad Nauheim to retreat within himself, and Hedi simply offered her understanding: “To judge by your card, Hechingen must be a charming, sleepy little place; just right to calm down the agitation which, to our regret, you were forced to endure here and in Nauheim. We do not want to disturb your slumbering consciousness with effusive letters; sometimes it is a good thing if one’s friends are removed from one’s consciousness, and I have the feeling that now is the time for us to disappear. After all, there is really nothing more obtrusive than ‘suffering with someone’; it is an encroachment on a friend’s life, a baring of the soul, of which one is ashamed afterwards,” she wrote in October of 1920.²²

It’s unlikely Hedi truly believed the words she spoke, and only wanted to show as much understanding as she could to a friend she desperately still needed to keep her own suffering from isolating, simplifying, achieving infinite-life and infinite-relatability. In that fractured time, instead of disappearing from his consciousness, Hedi and Max took up a battle that was in the name of helping Einstein, but was really more to do with Max’s ego, and perhaps Hedi’s disappointment in losing an important friend. They learned that Einstein had given his permission for a philosopher to publish a book of his conversations with the great physicist, as a way for people to get to know Einstein the person. At that time, this was a very odd thing in the world of scientists, who went to great lengths to take their personal selves out of their work, both in practice and in publishing. When Max Born published a photograph and one page biography of Einstein the previous year in his book on relativity, his colleagues condemned him for the very unscientific act to a point where Max redacted the biography and photo for the next edition. He admitted later in life that this embarrassment likely led to a resentment over the permission given to this philosopher.²³

Hedi became so emotional about the issue that she turned her sharp tongue on Einstein’s second wife, blaming her for allowing the debacle to happen. When the book published it caused none of the problems the Borns predicted it would, but Einstein’s reaction every step of the way was flat and unaffected. His friends and the world were losing this man to the reverberations of depravity, ego and, in the case of Hedi, the reverberations of an unhealed sadness that left her rudderless in the world outside the temple.

For nearly a year Einstein and Hedi’s friendship essentially ceases to exist after Einstein has “a tiff with your wife for the sake of mine”, he wrote to Max.²⁴ He and Max continue to exchange letters, but they focus entirely on academic and administrative matters. Einstein once again turned to optimism regarding politics, believing global politics would alleviate the pains Germany still felt, but in a darkly intuitive foreshadowing, Max wrote in February of 1921: “I cannot share your optimism in political matters, although I do not believe that things are quite as black as they are painted. We are not going to pay as much as is asked for. But I can see the effect of this power politics on the minds of the people; it is a wholly irreversible accumulation of ugly feelings of anger, revenge, and hatred. In small towns such as Gottingen, this is very noticeable. I can, of course, understand it. My reason tells me that it is stupid to react in this way; but my emotional reaction is still the same. It seems to me that new catastrophes will inevitably result from all this. The world is not ruled by reason; even less by love. But I hope that the harmony between us will not be disrupted again.”²⁵

The universe has an infinite-capacity to surprise conscious minds with turns of events that, despite having no place in a consciously-perceived chain-of-events, completely annihilate the past. In August of that year Max informed Einstein that, “A small boy, Gustav Born, came into the world on July 29th.”²⁶ Later that year, old Diogenes read, for the first time in a long time, a little of that wit and humour from his old friend Hedi: “With this card, Gustav Born begs to introduce himself to you, and begs you (1) for your goodwill and affection and (2) not to bear a grudge to his mother for whom he is, after all, not responsible.

“XXX Signed: Gustav”²⁷

 

References

References to The Born-Einstein Letters with Commentaries by Max Born (1-3, 5-12, 20-27).

The Born Letters. (1971). G.V.R. Born, I. Newton-John, M. Pryce; The Einstein Letters. (1971) Estate of Albert Einstein; Commentaries. (1971) G.V.R. Born; Translation. (1971). Newton-John.

1) Hedwig Born to Albert Einstein, 9 October 1944, Pg. 152.

2) Albert Einstein to Hedwig Born, 1 September 1919, pg. 13.

3) Albert Einstein to Hedwig Born, 8 February 1918, pg. 5.

5) Albert Einstein to Max Born, 1918, pg. 7.

6) Hedwig Born to Albert Einstein, 1927, pg. 93-94.

7) Albert Einstein to Max Born, 19 January 1919, pg. 9.

8) Albert Einstein to Max Born, 4 June 1919, pg. 11.

9) Albert Einstein to Max and Hedwig Born, 27 January 1920, pg. 21.

10) Albert Einstein to Hedwig Born, 18 April 1920, pg. 29.

11) Max Born to Albert Einstein, 21 June 1920, pg. 30.

12) Hedwig Born to Albert Einstein, 31 July 1920, pg. 32.

20) Hedwig Born to Albert Einstein, 8 September 1920, pg. 34.

21) Max’s commentary for the letter from Albert Einstein to Max and Hedwig Born, 9 September 1920, pg. 36.

22) Hedwig Born to Albert Einstein, 2 October 1920, pg. 36.

23) Max’s commentary for the letter from Albert Einstein to Max Born, October 1920, pg. 42.

24) Albert Einstein to Max Born, 30 January 1921, pg. 50.

25) Max Born to Albert Einstein, 12 February 1921, pg. 54.

26) Max Born to Albert Einstein, 4 August 1921, pg. 56.

27) Gustav Born (via Hedwig Born) to Albert Einstein, 1 November 1921, pg. 60.

References for The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein: https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/ (13-14, 16-19, 4)

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Princeton University Press. (1998). The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 10: The Berlin Years: Correspondence, May-December 1920, and Supplementary Correspondence, 1909-1920 (English translation supplement).

Edited by Diana Kormos Buchwald, Tilman Sauer, Ze’ev Rosenkranz, Josef Illy & Virginia Iris Holmes.

Translated by Ann Hentschel.

13) Footnote 1, Letter 111: From Israel Malkin, 27 August 1920.

14) Letter 113: From Ina Dickmann, 28 August, 1920.

16) Letter 114: From Paul Ehrenfest, 28 August, 1920.

17) Letter 114: From Kurt J. Grau, 29 August 1920.

18) Letter 118: From Helmut Block, 30 August 1920.

19) Letter 127: From Paul Ehrenfest, 2 September 1920.

4) Einstein, A. (1918). Motives for Research. Presented 26 April 1918. Published July 1918.

(Untranslated)

Zu Max Plancks sechzigstem Geburtstag. Ansprachen, gehalten am 26. April 1918 in der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft von E. Warburg, M. v. Laue, A. Sommerfeld und A. Einstein. Karlsruhe: C.F. Müllersche Hofbuchhandlung, 1918, pp. 29-32.

(Translated)

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Princeton University Press. (1998). The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 7: The Berlin Years: Writings, 1918-1921 (English translation supplement).

Translation from Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, trans. Sonja Bargmann (New York: Crown, 1982).

15) Einstein, A. (1920). My Response. On the Anti-Relativity Company. Published 27 August 1920 In: Berliner Tageblatt, 27 August 1920, Morgen-Ausgabe, pp. [1–2].